A recent management study revealed that 46% of employees leaving a company do so because they feel unappreciated; 61% said their bosses don’t place much importance on them as people; and 88% said they don’t receive acknowledgment for the work they do.

Whether you are an entrepreneur, manager, teacher, parent, coach or simply a friend, if you want to be successful with other people, you must master the art of appreciation.

I’ve never known anyone to complain about receiving too much positive feedback. Have you? In fact, just the opposite is true.

Consider this: Every year, a management consulting firm conducts a survey with 200 companies on the subject on what motivates employees. When given a list of 10 possible things that would most motivate them, the employee always list appreciation as the number-one motivator.

I read a short article in an in-flight magazine years ago that ignited my career and changed my life. The small publishing company I had started was about three years old; we had no capital and we were losing money every month.

The article I happened to see was about a Swiss hotel that had been losing money as well. The building was run down and employee morale was low. The owners interviewed a potential new manager, and he said if he was hired for the job, he would implement this simple formula: one-third of the profits would be plowed back into the hotel for renovation, one-third would go to owners, and one-third to employees.

Over the years I have had a lot of feedback on this book. Most of it has been very good; many of the stories about what people have done after reading this book are what I call miracle stories.

One woman woke her husband up at 3:00 in the morning after she finished Visionary Business and told him, “I’m going to double our sales in three months.” She was working on her dream, her own retail shop, selling the things she loved, but it had been a struggle every step of the way. She knew if she doubled her sales, she would be cruising along profitably and would be able to do substantial profit sharing with all her employees. Within three months, she had doubled her sales.

People have been thinking for thousands of years. Why do we suddenly need a book to tell us how to think?

People have been running, too, for thousands of years. But if you want to be in the Olympics, it’s generally a good idea to get a coach.

Most of us can think really well about one or two parts of a problem at any given moment. The challenge is that most problems are more complicated than that, and what might seem like a good solution at first can end up spawning all kinds of other problems we didn’t expect. Brilliant thinking is meant to take our good thinking abilities and use them to completely think through really complex problems — so we can come up with creations and solutions that we’ll be happy about not only today but five years from now.